Comment by poulsbohemian

> Afterwards, "programming" was solidly a domain of professionals, not regular users. I don't know about MacOS, but Windows didn't even ship with anything resembling a programming environment until 2010s.

I'm not sure I agree completely...back in the day on the Mac we had Hypercard, RezEdit, and I do recall various code builder tools that someone could kinda wire up small tools - think things we called "4GLs". On Windows, Visual Basic was a full programming language and tooling, but I distinctly recall lots of non-programmers creating small office scripts and tools. In the late 90s we had things like FrontPage where non-programmers could wire up a simple web page and make it do things they wanted...

Today? Open up Xcode and stare into the abyss of confusion. Apple has made these "Playground" tools - man, that's a big jump for someone who isn't serious about programming to get from there to a full-fledged Swift app ready to deploy. Can generative AI tools bridge this gap for non-programmers? Possibly, but I think we're aligned that these tools aren't likely to replace us anytime soon, because of something you allude to - what's possible today is so much more complex than what we were building in the 80s and 90s, and AI isn't close to being able to replicate all of layers of stuff a professional programer wades through every day.